Summa I, Q.75 a.4: Is the Soul the Man? Body and Soul, and Truth as the Mean Between Extremes

Orientation #

He opens by saying “we’re up to Article Four here, in Question Seventy-Five,” and refers back to “the third article” (prev. lecture) as having shown that sensing is not an operation of the soul alone. At the end he calls a break and says they will go on to Article Five, “trying to divide evenly between these two articles.” The previous class treated Article 3 (whether brute souls are subsistent) and the next treats Article 5 (whether the soul is composed of matter and form).

The class, in order #

1. Opening and the question (“whether the soul is man”) #

Before the prayer a fragment of conversation: a student found it strange that Thomas says we can never repay our parents, since they gave us our body and life; he agrees (“more than”). After the opening prayer he states the question: since the soul was shown to be subsistent, and something substantial can exist by itself, one might guess that the soul is man; Thomas will reason against that.

2. The two objections (“the inward man is renewed from day to day”) #

• Objection 1 (2 Cor 4:16): the outward man is corrupted, the inward man renewed day by day. Aside: it is not the outward man that is renewed once “you’re over the hill.” What is within man is the soul; so the soul is the interior man, i.e. man.
• Objection 2: the human soul is a substance, not a universal one (species or genus), so a particular substance, hence a hypostasis or persona.
  • Word note: Greek hypostasis etymologically named any individual substance, but came to be used for an individual substance of a rational or intellectual nature; Latin persona means exactly that. In the treatise on God Thomas always takes Boethius’s definition: an individual substance of a rational nature.
  • Thomas always denied the soul is a person, because it does not have a complete nature. Hence “St. Peter pray for us” is a figure of speech, synecdoche: St. Peter is not in heaven, the soul of St. Peter is; but Christ and Mary are in heaven.
  • Aside: De Koninck, in his audience with Pius XII, used these points about the Assumption: it was fitting that Mary herself, not just her soul, be in heaven, given her importance and causality.

3. Sed contra and the three possibilities (“neither just a soul nor just a body”) #

Augustine (City of God, book 19) commends Varro, who held man to be neither soul alone nor body alone but both at once. The three possibilities remind him of Plato’s Alcibiades I (an early dialogue whose authenticity some doubt, though he and Leo Strauss think it genuine): Socrates asks, am I a soul, a body, or something composed of both? In the Phaedo Socrates seems to speak as if he were just soul; most people think of themselves as just a body; maybe the truth is in the middle.

4. First sense: man in general is not soul only (“only the form was of the definition of the species”) #

Point: the Platonist claim that only form belongs to the definition of the species, matter only to the individual, has a real basis in logic that must be understood before Thomas’s correction makes sense.

• From logic: genus is a name said with one meaning of many things other in kind, signifying what each is (animal of dog, cat, horse: “What is a dog? An animal”). It signifies only in a general way, so one adds the difference, a name said of many things other in kind signifying how they are what they are; differences both separate the kinds and are what each has in addition (quadrilateral is the genus of square; equilateral and right-angled are the differences).
• The kinds under a genus are called eidos in Greek, species in Latin, and in English sometimes form. Eidos is related to eidenai (seeing), species to speculare (to look at): the form one sees. Democracy is a species, or a form, of government. So what is defined is called form.
• The likeness that misleads: genus is to difference as matter is to form (quadrilateral: four sides that can be equal or unequal, meeting at right, obtuse or acute angles; the differences determine one or the other). Not the same as matter and form, “but there’s a likeness there.” Genus is related to generation. Likewise the lowest species stands to individuals as form to matter: the same kind realized in this flesh and blood or that, in this metal or that. Strengthened by mathematics: sphere is one form realized in wood, glass or steel.
• The relevant sense of nature (from the fifth book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics V]) is the one derived from form: what a thing is. So the Platonists, entering natural philosophy through logic, tend to think what is definable is just form.
• Thomas’s correction, as in natural philosophy: the definition of a natural thing, unlike a mathematical thing, signifies form and matter in general. Not my flesh, blood and bones, but that a man has flesh, blood and bones. A geometrical sphere has no matter; the Earth or Sun, roughly spheres, have some kind of matter. Not individual matter, signata materia (a student asks; he explains: the matter pointed out, source of individuation), but common matter. Whatever is common to the substance of all individuals under the species pertains to the species: what is a dog in general must say what all individual dogs are, and it is common to all of them to be flesh and blood as well as soul.

5. Second sense: this soul is not this man (“that is each thing which does the operations”) #

Point: the identity of me with my soul stands or falls with whether sensing is the soul’s own act without the body.

1. Man is an animal with reason; he has what the animal has, sensing abilities.
2. If sensing were done by the soul without the body, all operations attributed to man (sensing, understanding, willing) would belong to the soul alone.
3. Principle, “kind of obvious if you stop and think about it”: that is each thing which does all the operations of that thing.
4. Then the soul would be me (“why would you need a body at all?”).
5. But it was shown (third article, prev. lecture) that sensing is not of the soul alone: touching and tasting involve the body; seeing is the eye acted on by colour, hearing the ear acted on by sound, so excessive sound hurts the ear.
   • Examples: the annual Christmas list of dangerous toys (25 this year), some dangerous because pieces can be swallowed, others because too loud for a child’s ear; young people at rock concerts going deaf, “especially that ear that’s turned to it” (their morals being corrupted “a minor thing, of course”); unlike his boxer friend Jim, deaf in one ear from a blow, here sound alone produces hardness of hearing.
6. Sensing is an operation of man, known by inward experience: the one who hears Mozart, sees the road and trees, tastes the food, is the one who thinks about what he senses, and digests for that matter.
7. Therefore I am soul and body, not one alone.

• Translation note: propria here is “private,” belonging to one alone, not “proper” as opposed to improper. Sensing is an operation of man but not private to him; understanding is private to man compared to the other animals.
• Plato, holding sensing private to the soul, could say man is a soul using a body.

6. Digression: the truth between extremes explains both (“having seen a part of life, they boast”) #

Point: when the truth is the middle, each extreme has a basis in what is; if either extreme were the whole truth, the other would have no basis at all.

• If man were just a soul, why would most men think they are a body (“anybody home?”)? If just a body, why would anyone think “there’s just a soul”? Both see part of the truth.
• Ethics parallel: many act as if sense pleasure were happiness; Aristotle says they would not think so without some truth in it: the best thing in life is not sense pleasure but is something pleasant to have (Scripture’s “torrent of pleasure” in God’s house, a spiritual pleasure). Whoever held that the best thing is pain has no basis in the truth at all.
• Soul’s definition: accidental-form people saw that the soul is a form; complete-substance people saw that it is something substantial; the whole truth, which Aristotle was first to see, is that the soul is a substantial form of a body composed of tools.
• The two chief mysteries: Trinity: Sabellius (one nature, so one person, named Father, Son, Spirit for different works) vs. Arius (three persons, so three natures, only the Father truly God); the truth, one nature three persons, is harder to see but lets you see how either heresy could arise. Heraclitus: having seen a part of life, they boast of having seen the whole. Incarnation, “just the reverse”: one person, two natures. Nestorius (two natures, so two persons; said Mary should not be called Mother of God, and a riot followed) vs. the Monophysites, Eutyches (one person, so one nature).
• Sign of truth: the middle position explains the extremes, but they cannot explain it; you can defend the truth and also show why people thought otherwise.
• Intellectual virtue thus resembles moral virtue, a mean between extremes (courage between cowardice and foolhardiness; liberality between stinginess and extravagance). Falstaff in Shakespeare: whoever says more or less than the truth is a villain and son of darkness. To say more than the truth is to say what is not is; less, that what is is not. Applied: one nature in Christ says what is is not; two persons says what is not is.
• Courtroom oath, from his logic class: “the whole truth and nothing but the truth” excludes the two departures. If John and Thomas alone were at the bar at nine, leaving out Thomas is not the whole truth (clipping it, as Shakespeare says); adding Paul is adding to the truth. Men go to extremes when mistaken, again and again in history.

7. Reply to the first: the interior man (“what is principal or chief in it”) #

Point: Paul’s inner and outer man is explained by the rule from Ethics book 9: each thing most of all seems to be what is principal in it, as what the ruler does the city is said to do.

• Examples: if Bush declares war on Iraq, the papers say “U.S. declares war”; Congress declared war on Japan, yet “U.S.” did; the French king’s L’état, c’est moi; the Pope declares a saint and we say the Church did.
• Interior man: the intellectual part, according to the truth of the thing. Exterior man: the sensitive part with the body, according to the estimate of those detained in sensible things, who think of themselves as simply a body. Aristotle at the end of the Ethics: reason more than anything else is man, “even stronger than saying the soul is man.”
• Aside: the old joke of “satisfying the inner man” when hungry is not Paul’s sense.
• Parallel: John’s “the Word was made flesh.” Two heresies: that the Word was changed into flesh (very gross), or that in Christ there is flesh but no human soul, the Word taking its place. Thomas in the commentary: synecdoche, name of the part for the whole; Scripture also says “to you all flesh must come,” and calls us souls. Daily instances: “he’s a brain”; Vinatieri, the Patriots’ kicker, called “the toe” (“I never see him miss”); “muscles”; Cyrano de Bergerac named from his nose; “bigger eyes.”

8. Reply to the second and close (“only one that has the complete nature”) #

Not every particular substance is a hypostasis or person, only one with the complete nature of the species; a hand or foot is not, nor the soul, being a part of the human species. He recalls the text Thomas often quotes from Job on the resurrection, “in my flesh I shall see God”: not seeing God through bodily eyes, but the soul seeing God face to face while again joined to the body. Break; then Article Five.

His words #

• hypostasis / persona: individual substance, in usage of a rational or intellectual nature; Boethius’s definition, individual substance of a rational nature.
• synecdoche: figure giving the name of the part to the whole (St. Peter in heaven; the Word made flesh; “he’s a brain”).
• genus: name said with one meaning of many things other in kind, signifying what each is.
• difference: name said of many things other in kind, signifying how they are what they are.
• eidos / species / form: what is defined; the form one sees (eidenai, speculare).
• “fifth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics V]: the sense of nature meaning form, what a thing is.
• signata materia: individual matter, “pointed out,” source of individuation, vs. common matter in the species.
• propria: “private,” belonging to one alone [ed.: usually rendered “proper”].
• “that is each thing which does the operations of that thing”: the principle behind the whole argument.
• more / less than the truth: to say what is not is / to say what is is not.
• interior man / exterior man: intellectual part vs. sensitive part with the body.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 75, a. 4: objections, sed contra, body, replies 1 and 2 (read and translated).
• 2 Corinthians 4:16 (in obj. 1).
• Augustine, City of God, book 19, on Varro (in sed contra).

Mentioned

• Plato, Alcibiades I; Plato, Phaedo.
• Boethius’s definition of person; Thomas’s treatise on God.
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, book 9 (reply 1), and the end of the Ethics on happiness and reason; the Ethics on opinions about happiness.
• Aristotle, Metaphysics V (inferred), on “nature.”
• Heraclitus, “having seen a part of life.”
• John 1:14 and Thomas’s commentary on it; “to you all flesh must come”; the “torrent of pleasure” in God’s house; Job, “in my flesh I shall see God” (Job 19:26, inferred).
• Shakespeare, Falstaff on more or less than the truth.
• Verified-source list also matches a handout on Metaphysics VI, lectio 4 (10 min); nothing in this transcript corresponds to it, so it is not treated here.

His questions #

• Whether the soul is man? No: man is composed of soul and body, in both senses of the question.
• Why did the Platonists think only form is defined? Because in logic the species is called form, and stands to genus and to individuals somewhat as form to matter, most clearly in mathematics.
• What does the definition of a natural thing signify? Form and matter, though common, not individual matter.
• What is materia signata? (student) The individual matter pointed out, the source of individuation.
• If the soul sensed by itself, what would follow? The soul alone would be me; “why would you need a body at all?”
• How do we know the one sensing is the one thinking? Inward experience: the one who sees, hears, tastes is the one who thinks about it.
• If man were just a soul, why would most think he is a body, and vice versa? Neither extreme could arise unless the truth were the middle, which gives each a basis.
• How should “the Word was made flesh” be understood? Synecdoche, the part named for the whole, not that the Word changed or replaced the soul.
• Why is the soul not a person? It lacks the complete nature of the species, like a hand or foot.